A Quantum Laser Pointer
Abstract
The measurement sensitivity of the pointing direction of a laser beam is ultimately limited by the quantum nature of light. To reduce this limit, we have experimentally produced a quantum laser pointer, a beam of light whose direction is measured with a precision greater than that possible for a usual laser beam. The laser pointer is generated by combining three different beams in three orthogonal transverse modes, two of them in a squeezed-vacuum state and one in an intense coherent field. The result provides a demonstration of multichannel spatial squeezing, along with its application to the improvement of beam positioning sensitivity and, more generally, to imaging.
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This work was carried out as part of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence Program. It was funded by the Australian Research Council and supported by the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel as part of QUANTIM, contract IST-2000-26019. We thank the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (Lindfield, Australia) for the precise making of the wave plates; B.C. Buchler and R. Schnabel for their valuable contributions, in particular to the design, construction, and optimization of the two OPAs; and A. Maître for invaluable discussions.
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Published In
Science
Volume 301 | Issue 5635
15 August 2003
15 August 2003
Copyright
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 6 May 2003
Accepted: 9 July 2003
Published in print: 15 August 2003
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